Upcoming Appearances

Aza Music and Community Music School of Santa Cruz present
Moroccan Village Music:
Imazighen Songs of the High Atlas Mountains


Participatory traditional music with
Fattah Abbou and Mohamed Aoualou of Morocco
and special guests Zambra, Lori Rivera,
and the Tamazight “village choir”

Song workshop: Sunday Nov 9th., 4pm – 6pm FREE
Concert: Friday Nov 14 at 8pm Tickets: $16 advance; $18 at door
Center for Spiritual Living
1818 Felt St. Santa Cruz, CA 95062
Advance concert tickets available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/

On Sunday, Nov. 9 from 4:00 -6:00pm at the Center for Spiritual Living in Santa Cruz, Fattah Abbou will offer a free public workshop on songs native to the Imazighen (Berber) people of Morocco. All are welcome to participate in this beautiful call-and-response style of singing, which is soulful, hypnotic, and repetitive in nature. All songs taught by ear and no experience necessary! Fattah is a master musician and an experienced teacher and cultural interpreter who makes this inclusive music style accessible.

On Friday, Nov. 14 at 8pm at the Center for Spiritual Living, Fattah Abbou and Mohamed Aoualou will present a full concert of Imazighen music. Joining them will be singers Lori Rivera, the Tamazight “village choir” of Fattah's local music students, and Zambra, a women's global vocal group, which will also share examples of other participatory traditional songs from their wider repertoire (Bulgarian, Celtic, Judaic, and American). Advance tickets recommended and available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com.

The Imazighen are an indigenous people of North Africa, with their own languages and tribal culture, whose recorded history goes back 3300 years. Among the Imazighen, music is a part of everyday life and everyone does it together. In the workshop and concert, Fattah aims to bring this spirit of multi-generational communal singing to Santa Cruz. Audiences will find common ground in the songs, which poetically comment on such universal human concerns as fate, integrity, right human relations, and the quest for spiritual clarity.

Fattah Abbou ( vocals, banjo, oud) was born and raised in Morocco's Atlas Mountains, and started playing traditional music of the Imazighen at age seven. He is proficient on several North African string instruments and percussion, and has recorded widely. He and his longtime musical partner Mohamed Aoualou play as a duo and with the band AZA, which has performed at festivals across the US and abroad.

Ten women strong, Zambra performs gorgeous original arrangements of vocal music from across the planet. They previously appeared alongside Fattah Abbou in MoveSpeakSpin dance company productions of Mosaic: Dances of Peace, Justice, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East under the direction of Dr. Karl Schaffer.

Fattah Abbou and Mohamed Aoualou have a website at http://azamusic.com/.

Imazighen Songs of the High Atlas Mountains workshop and concert are funded, in part, by a grant from Arts Council Santa Cruz County.
For more information please contact Fattah Abbou at azamusic@yahoo.com 831-331-3849 or Janet Herman at fasola@cruzio.com 831-429-1691.